Turning the page — to Afghanistan

It is time to turn the page on the war in Iraq, President Barack Obama said from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, but he only grudgingly acknowledged the unavoidable next page in his reluctant war presidency: Afghanistan.

The nation’s longest war got two paragraphs in Obama’s address, an inconvenient detour on the rhetorical path from rebuilding Iraq to rebuilding America’s economy. But with the war that defined his candidacy in 2008 now receding, the conflict he set up then as its counterpoint — the Afghan war — now appears far more likely to define his presidency.

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Obama the candidate and Obama the president have been consistent — to his supporters, maddeningly so — on the two wars. Tuesday’s speech returned Obama to his political roots as an anti-war Illinois state senator in 2002 who was surprisingly careful to say that he wasn’t opposed to war — just dumb wars. And now that the dumb war, in his estimation, is over, he appears more committed than ever to the good war in Central Asia.

He first made that distinction in his now famous speech to a half-filled Daley Plaza in Chicago in October 2002, in which he made clear that striking at Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies at their Afghanistan source was something quite different than the impending invasion of Iraq.

“I don’t oppose all wars,” he said then. “After Sept. 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.”

For the anti-war activists who brought him to that speech, Obama’s declaration of the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq eight years later was bittersweet.

“It's really heartbreaking,” said Bettylu Salzman, an early Obama patron and Chicago philanthropist who helped convince Obama to give the speech, in an e-mail to POLITICO. “My only thought is we should have been concentrating on the war we were fighting at that time — Afghanistan.

Another organizer of that event, Chicago public relations woman and anti-war activist Marilyn Katz, found herself conflicted by Tuesday’s announcement.

“We’ve become a country of permanent war — and where are all the demonstrators now?” she asked, adding that she blames the relative silence of the left more than she does Obama for the continuing conflict in Afghanistan.

“It’s a very difficult thing,” she said.

Obama’s passionate attacks on the Iraq war — he referred to it in 2002 as “the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne” — subsided as the threat from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton faded through the spring of 2008. He and Clinton had both frustrated the Democratic left with their moderation, rolling out similar timetables for withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq some time in the middle of 2010. Obama fulfilled his promise, only a few months behind schedule.